Marc Myers writes daily on jazz legends and legendary jazz recordings

May 2012

May 31, 2012

Epic songs are always in the air. Unless you're keenly aware of those songs, you probably aren't even aware of how many times you hear them. For example, Stand By Me—written by Ben E. King, Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber—is the third most-played BMI song on the radio and TV since the organization's founding in 1940. After writing my profile of Mike for the Wall Street Journal (go here), I, of course, became more keenly aware of the song. [Pictured clockwise above, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and Ben E. King]

A few weeks ago, the song was playing on the jukebox when I walked into Pizzeria Regina on Thatcher St. in Boston. Then last week, I was taking the subway downtown in New York. As I walked from the Times Square Shuttle at Grand Central to the Lexington Ave. line, there was a woman with a karaoke box and a mike soulfully singing Stand By Me. When I told her I'd tell the song's composer about her version, she nearly passed out.

In Part 3 of my transcribed conversation with Mike Stoller for the Wall Street Journal, the fabled R&B-rock songwriter talks about the making of Stand By Me and what makes the song so irresistible:

Marc Myers: Are you and Ben E. King excited about the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s "Towering Song Award" for Stand By Me?Mike Stoller: Yes. It’s funny, I just got off the phone with Ben E. King. He had called me last week, and I called him back this morning. We talked about how cool it was that we were getting the awards. We speak a few times a year. Sometimes I call him if there’s a request for the use of the song and want to get his OK.

MM: You, Jerry Leiber and Ben E. King are credited with writing Stand By Me—yet the label on the 45-rpm says “King-Glick.” Who was Glick?MS: [Laughs] Jerry thought that three names would be too long on the label, so we created a joint pseudonym: “Elmo Glick.” Elmo was for blues slide-guitarist Elmore James and Glick was for Sammy Glick from Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? I helped Jerry make up the name. We thought it was funny.

MM: How did the co-writing work?MS: Ben E. had the beginings of a song—both words and music. He worked on the lyrics together with Jerry, and I added elements to the music, particularly the bass line. To some degree, it’s based on a gospel song called Lord Stand By Me. I have a feeling that Jerry and Ben E. were inspired by it. Ben, of course, had a strong background in church music. He’s a 50% writer on the song, and Jerry and I are 25% each.

MM: Where was your office in the summer of 1960?MS: For three years—between 1957 and 1960—when we moved back to New York from California, our office was wherever we were. It could be Jerry’s place, my place, Hill & Range’s offices, Atlantic Records’ offices and so on. When our publishing deal expired with Hill & Range in 1960, we started a publishing company of our own. So we took a place at 40 W. 57th St., which is now a tall office tower. At that time it was a five-story building with a corset shop on the ground floor.

MM: What floor were you on? MS: The top floor—the fifth. It had a skylight.

MM: What happened when you arrived late that day?MS: When I walked in, Jerry and Ben E. were working on the lyrics to a song. They were at an old oak desk we had in the office. Jerry was sitting behind it, and Benny was sitting on the top. They looked up and said they were writing a song. I said, “Let me hear it.”

MM: How did they audition it for you?MS: Ben began to sing the song a cappella. I went over to the upright piano and found the chord changes behind the melody he was singing. It was in the key of A. Then I created a bass line. Jerry said, “Man that’s it!” We used my bass pattern for a starting point and, later, we used it as the basis for the string arrangement created by Stanley Applebaum.

MM: How long did it take for Stand By Me to come together? MS: Not very long. I don’t know how long Jerry and Ben E. had been working on it before I arrived, but we had the music and words in place that day. I suspect it was a couple of hours. I also suspect Ben E. may have had some ideas about it when he came in and met with Jerry. The bass line just grew out of running down the song.

MM: When did you add the guiro—the percussion instrument that sounds like a match striking?MS: When Stanley Applebaum and I began to write an orchestration for the song. The vision for the orchestration was mine, but the full arrangement was his. It was all based on my bass pattern. Jerry and I were into the Latin stuff, particularly the baion beat. We had the guiro play on every second beat and a triangle on every fourth. It just seemed to work beautifully, particularly with the strings.

MM: Supporting the strings is that bass line. MS: We enhanced it by having an electric guitar play what the bass was playing—but an octave higher—to accentuate the pattern and give it a brighter feel, particularly behind the strings.

MM: You and Leiber had first used strings on There Goes My Baby with the Drifters a year earlier in 1959.MS: Yes, I was playing this line that sounded like a Russian take on Middle Eastern music. I described it then as sounding “a little Caucasian” [laughs]. With that in mind, on Stand By Me, I told Stanley Applebaum to write some Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov. Stanley wound up writing a beautiful invention in two parts for the song.

MM: The strings keep rising, hymn-like. MS: That’s largely the string parts that Stanley arranged. When they first come in on the first refrain, they’re low. On the second refrain they’re higher, and they rise higher and higher along the way. But they’re playing the bass pattern, in effect.

MM: Why is King’s vocal so special?MS: Among all the kids singing back then, Ben was the most mature-sounding young man. His delivery and the timbre of his voice was advanced beyond his years. Most of the young kids singing back then sounded like, well, kids. Ben had a style that was akin to Arthur Prysock or Billy Eckstine. His sound was settled. It wasn’t in a hurry. That was a wonderful characteristic about Ben.

MM: Why is the bass pattern so powerful?MS: That’s for writers and historians like you to say. Musically, I think it’s because the line adds to Ben’s sincerity. It’s also insistent, I suppose. Even though there are chords all the way through, Ben is really singing against that bass pattern. It’s the same chord progression for the verse and the chorus.

MM: What else is going on in there that most people don’t realize?MS: There’s a male choir very low on the second verse. We also had an electric guitar playing the blangs—the chords that ring we called "the blangs." In fact, we had lots of guitars at our sessions, maybe three or four.

MM: What about on Stand By Me?MS: On there, we had five. On the session, we used our usual four and, to keep Phil Spector in pocket change, we used him as the fifth. We had hired him in 1960 and put him on the session.

Tomorrow, Mike talks about his and Jerry Leiber's production style in the recording studio that most influenced Phil Spector and his "Wall of Sound" in the early 1960s.

And here's Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber on What's My Line in 1957. They were so obscure and so thoroughly unknown that no blindfolds were needed. And dig Dorothy Kilgallen's snide cracks about rock 'n' roll when their identities are revealed...

May 30, 2012

If you close your eyes, songwriter Mike Stoller sounds a little like comedian Larry David. The tone is distinctly New York—insistent and street smart. But unlike David, Mike's voice has tones that are more nasal and much gentler, the result of an upbringing in Queens, a borough of New York that's halfway to the suburbs of Long Island.

Mike likes things simple, and leaves the angst and analysis to others. One senses that he likes to keep things light, relying on humor to deflect negative thinking and reflecting on life's ironies from the perspective of a spectator rather than a participant or victim. [Photo of Mike Stoller and wife Corky Hale in March 2012 by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images North America]

In Part 2 of my conversation with Mike for the Wall Street Journal (go here to read my profile), the R&B songwriter reflects on co-composing Jailhouse Rock, his role in helping R&B cross over to white markets in 1957, and his writing partner Jerry Leiber:

Marc Myers:Jailhouse Rock in 1957 was something of a turning point for R&B and rock, wasn't it?Mike Stoller: In what way?

MM: Elvis had his 1956 run and becomes larger than life, the civil rights movement shifts gears, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis add a wild streak, the Coasters, Drifters and Platters cross over, images of racial strife appear on TV and in print, and there are several major political events of the year. In this context, Jailhouse Rock sounds like something of a generational bond-cutter.MS: Interesting. But it’s not that different thematically from Riot in Cell Block #9 though, don’t you think?

MM: I don't know. To me, there’s a different edge—a towel-snap feel to the words and music that’s less about a whimsical prison uprising and more about flaunting authority, rebelling against your captors—teachers, parents and so on. It's a clarion call, and I think that’s why it crossed over and resonated.MS: Good point. And yet there’s playfulness to it, too. The song doesn’t feel unsafe. [Pictured: Elvis Presley on the set of Jailhouse Rock in 1957]

MM: Exactly, which is so true of many of your songs. Humor crosses all barriers. The movie version of Jailhouse Rock and the record have different instrumental approaches, yes?MS: Yes. I had nothing to do with the movie’s orchestration. The record was made first and became the template for the movie. The movie folks wound up doing an expanded orchestral version because of the visual choreography.

MM: What do you think of the movie version?MS: I like it. It was funny. The record also was visual, but in one’s imagination. I thought that Elvis’ dancing performance in the movie was wonderful.

MM: How did you come to write that blues? It has a Freddie Slack feel.MS: [Laughs]. Freddie Slack! I haven’t heard that name in ages. The melody just came. It’s based on the kind of blues breaks that had been part of the blues literature, so to speak. I just tried to find a way to make it a little different. Jerry and I wanted to create a style that we felt would be easy for Elvis to relate to and sing.

MM: The lyrics are a little homeoerotic in places, no?MS: You mean, “Number 47 said to Number. 3, you’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see?” Nah. It’s whatever you think it means. There’s an edge but none of that was intended.

MM: Despite the whimsy, there's a dark edge to that song. What inspired it? MS: We were given a script. In the script, there was a note in brackets that simply said, “There’s a talent contest in prison” [laughs].

MM: [Laughing] That's rich. That was it? MS: That’s all. But you know, we didn’t read the whole script when we first got it. In fact, we just thumbed it. We got the script in New York. [Photo: Mike Stoller at the piano]

MM: Why were you in New York?MS: After I returned from Europe in 1956 and Jerry told me about Hound Dog becoming a big hit for Elvis, I checked into the Algonquin Hotel, where Jerry was staying. That night we went to dinner at the Russian Tea Room. That’s when I first met the guys at Atlantic—Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson [the label's co-founders] and Jerry Wexler, who by then was co-producing with Ertegun. Abramson at that point was running Atco, an Atlantic subsidiary, that was set up for him when he returned from the Army. Ahmet and his brother Nesuhi Ertegun, who ran the jazz side, took us to dinner. Then we went to the old Basin Street to hear the Modern Jazz Quartet.

MM: So you remained in New York?MS: We began writing for the Coasters, who had signed with Atco. We had been writing for them and producing their records when they were known as the Robins. Jerry and I took an apartment on East 71st St. It was a six-month sublet. After the lease was up, we went home to L.A. Then in March 1957, we returned to N.Y. to hang out with Ahmet and Jerry Wexler. By then, we had had some successes with Elvis, and Colonel Parker, Presley’s manager, wanted us to write the music to his next movie, Jailhouse Rock. So we went up to Hill & Range, the music publishing company that controlled Elvis’ music, to pick up the script.

MM: What did you do with the script? MS: When Jerry and I got back to our hotel suite on West 55th St., we tossed it on the corner table, on top of a bunch of hotel magazines. Then we set out to enjoy New York.

MM: What did you do?MS: We spent the next few weeks going to jazz clubs and cabarets and the theater. I remember we went to see Cy Coleman and his trio. Ray Mosca was on drums. I had gone to high school in Queens with Ray before my family moved to L.A. in 1949.

MM: What motivated you and Leiber to finally pick up the script?MS: Weeks later, Jean Aberbach, a co-owner of Hill & Range, showed up at our hotel unannounced. It was a Saturday, and Jerry and I were having breakfast. Jean said, “Fellows, where are my songs?” Jerry said, “Don’t worry Jean, you’ll have your songs.” We both glanced over at our script in the corner.

MM: What did Aberbach say?MS: He said, “I know I’ll have my songs, boys, because I’m not leaving here until I do.”

MM: What did he do?MS: Jean got up and pushed a big overstuffed chair against the door. He said, “I’m going to take a nap, and I’m not leaving until I have them.”

MM: How long did his nap last?MS: About four hours. When he woke up, four songs were done.

MM: Which ones?MS:Jailhouse Rock, Treat Me Nice, (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care and I Want to Be Free. All sort of related to being cooped up in that suite [laughs].

MM: What was going on inside the music business regarding civil rights in 1957?MS: I can only tell you what we experienced, as I experienced it. In terms of integration, it wasn’t an issue. Jerry and I had been writing, creating and recording in an integrated community from 1950. Only later, in the 60s, were there schisms in the music industry in response to the black power movement, when some of our relationships grew uncomfortable.

MM: Were you conscious of the civil rights movement?MS: We were conscious of it to a degree. We were aware that what we had experienced in our lives, in our early lives with our interracial relationships, was starting to happen nationwide.

MM: Was the movement a conscious part of your music?MS: No. It was just the music Jerry and I loved. The music had always been integrated for us. We were simply creating songs that were extensions of our own interracial experiences.

MM: Was there pushback by white record executives asking you to write in a certain way—to avoid trouble in the South, for example?MS: Never. Not at all. Our songs actually sold well in the South, particularly in black communities. We’d see our songs in Cash Box on the R&B charts that covered 16 different markets. There was a chart for Harlem, Chicago South Side, Shreveport, Kansas City and so on. Each chart had different songs rising and falling as opposed to the pop chart, which was a national thing.

MM: Did you feel that what you and Leiber were doing was maverick from a civil rights perspective?MS: We weren’t really political. We didn’t think of it that way. We weren’t devoid of any sense of what was going on. Nor were we were devoid of racial politics, and right and wrong. But there was no black and white for us. We were writing what appealed to us, which happened to be mostly music performed and recorded by black artists. We were entertaining ourselves when we wrote. Our backgrounds had erased all of that.

MM: How so?MS: I had gone to an interracial summer camp from age 7 to 15, and Jerry had lived a different experience—though similar in terms of his exposure to black families. His mother ran a little store in Baltimore, and Jerry delivered soft coal and kerosene to the black community on the edge of where he lived. He had relations with black kids and dated black girls. We both did. Jerry was welcome there because he was literally delivering the light.

MM: How did you two meet?MS: When we were still in our late teens in 1950, Jerry called me out of the blue and said he was a songwriter. He said he had heard about me from a drummer he knew and asked if I wanted to write songs with him. I said I wasn't interested in writing pop songs. Less than an hour later, Jerry showed up at my front door with pages of lyrics. When I saw they were in the form of 12-bar blues, I agreed to write with him. I loved the blues.

MM: Was Leiber a nice guy?MS: Yes. Sometimes he was tormented. Sometimes he was extremely generous. He was complex.

MM: Do you miss him?MS: Yeah. I miss… [pauses]. I miss the kid I met in 1950. The ambitious, aggressive, dynamic and exciting kid. Jerry used to say to me when we drove around in my ‘37 Plymouth, “We’re going to be rich and famous." I thought he was deluding himself.

MM: Your pragmatism was offset by his dreaming?MS: I guess so. Jerry used to say he had no brakes and I had no motor.

MM: What did he mean?MS: That he might go off in a direction at any given moment. Without me to hold him back, he might have gone off the edge of the world. But without that streak, I wouldn’t have been motivated. Which was the no-motor part.

MM: You guys were pretty prolific for you to have been unmotivated.MS: Oh, I was plenty motivated to write but not to promote myself. I was very shy. But together it worked.

MM: Are you still shy?MS: No, I don’t think so.

MM: Was that a result of Leiber?MS: Maybe. But at a certain point in our relationship… It’s weird. Early on, in interviews, Jerry did all the talking. And then at a certain point in our relationship, that shifted. He acknowledged that. I can’t pinpoint the date. It just changed.

May 29, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I traveled to Los Angeles for the Wall Street Journal to interview Mike Stoller at his home high in the Hollywood Hills. My conversation with rock 'n' roll's first successful songwriter—with hits dating back to 1951—appears in today's paper (or go here). [Photo of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller by David Attie for Vogue's "People Are Talking" in July 1959]

On June 14, the Songwriter's Hall of Fame will honor Ben E. King, Mike and his late writing partner Jerry Leiber after naming Stand By Me (1961) the 2012 "Towering Song of the Year." Mike co-wrote many of R&B's and early rock's biggest hits, including Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, Kansas City, Love Potion #9, Poison Ivy, Smokey Joe's Café, Yakety Yak, On Broadway, Young Blood, Fools Fall in Love and There Goes My Baby. Leiber and Stoller also wrote Peggy Lee's hit versions of "I'm a Woman" and "Is That All There Is?" The list goes on and on. [Pictured above: Ben E. King and Mike Stoller]

In Part 1 of my conversation with Mike, the 79-year-old R&B and pop-rock songwriter talks about early piano lessons with a jazz legend in the '40s, his close call on the high seas in 1956, and the crossover of R&B to rock 'n' roll in 1957:

Marc Myers: Nine is a lucky number for you, isn’t it?Mike Stoller: [Laughs]. Always. Love Potion #9, Riot in Cell Block #9 and others. We always knew the word “nine” sounded great. Strangely, when I go for my annual physical, my doctor puts his stethoscope on my back and asks me to say "nine." The number vibrates.

MM: Can you still play a mean boogie-woogie? MS: I doubt it. I haven’t played a boogie-woogie in ages. I use the piano in my office here to write, and I’m still sort of uncertain and very private when I write. Even at home, when I’m working alone, I like to wear headphones that cover my ears. I find my place when all is blocked out.

MM: How many lessons did you take with James P. Johnson?MS: Oh, six or seven in 1943 or 1944.

MM: Would your life have been different if those lessons didn’t take place?MS: Probably. I may have picked up some of the information I learned about the blues from listening. But getting it directly from James P. was much more powerful and first-hand. Things like the structure of blues and boogie-woogie. Before taking those lessons, I would play a 1 chord until I got tired and then move to a four chord until I got tired of that one—without the knowledge of the 12-bar structure.

MM: James P. Johnson should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.MS: [Laughs] I suppose so.

MM: What was Johnson like?MS: He was very gentle, considering I was a little kid who wanted to play boogie-woogie. That’s all I wanted to play. Of course, he could have taught me so many other things and so much more if I had been interested. He was a wonderful composer and stride pianist.

MM: In pictures, his face looks so kind and nurturing.MS: Yeah, that’s what I felt when I was with him. He made me feel comfortable. He did keep a bottle of Southern Comfort on the piano. He never drank from it, though. When I told Jerry about the bottle after Jerry and I met in 1950, he said James P. kept it there for when I came over [laughs].

MM: When Johnson said to you, “Understanding structure is the key to confidence,” what did he mean?MS: Just that. That I had to know certain rules first—not in the sense of rules that couldn’t be broken. All rules are meant to be broken here, there or everywhere. What he meant was that if you have the knowledge of structure, you will feel safe and in control, enabling you to try new things.

MM: You were on the S.S. Andrea Doria when it was struck in July 1956.MS: Yes, I was on board with my first wife [today, Mike is married to jazz pianist and harpist Corky Hale]. It was a traumatic event. When the ship was listing, I said to myself, “This is it.” But when I got off the ship, I blocked most of it out.

MM: But you recall what happened? MS: Yes, it's still there. In 1981, 25 years after the event, I was living in New York and was asked to go up to Boston for a radio show about the ship’s sinking. I hadn’t really thought much about it and never dwelled on it. Occasionally it was a subject that came up during dinner conversation. That kind of thing. At any rate, in Boston, they asked me whether I remembered Linda Morgan, the little girl who had survived by being thrown randomly from the ship to the Stockholm as it hit us. When I thought back, I started to cry without being able to prevent it. I had pushed those memories out of my mind, and they came back with the question.

MM: How did you change creatively after the collision and rescue?MS: I can’t tell you that. It’s impossible for me to know.

MM: Most people hear a song’s words and assume that’s the song. How do you explain what you do? MS: Jerry wrote words and I wrote the music—the melody and harmony. But I would make suggestions for lyrics and Jerry would contribute to the music. I’d suggest using “and” instead of “but” and he’d say, "Make the note go up rather than down.” In the beginning, it was all back-and-forth, the two of us shouting phrases—words and notes. Jerry couldn’t write music but he could sing a line. Even with that said, Jerry really wrote the words and I really wrote the music.

MM: But beyond the music?MS: With small groups, I often wrote the arrangements and played the piano on almost all the Coasters records and some of the other things we recorded. When we started to use larger orchestras after There Goes My Baby, I didn’t feel confident enough, so I liked to work with very talented orchestrators and arrangers like Stanley Applebaum.

MM: How did that work?MS: I’d work with the orchestrator at the piano, and he would sketch what I wanted. I felt that if he put his pencil on the score, it was going to sound more professional and safe than if I did. But I contributed to the orchestration on almost all the records we produced.

MM: In 1957, was the crossover of your songs from R&B to mainstream rock ‘n’ roll intentional?MS: How so?

MM: Were you and Leiber looking for a way to widen the audience for your music—or did it just happen?MS: It just happened. We had always written primarily for black audiences. We had started out writing blues for Jimmy Witherspoon, Charles Brown, Little Esther, Big Mama Thornton and others. Before 1957, there were rare moments when we were hired to write for white R&B groups. The rare exception was Black Denim Trousers for the Cheers in 1955. It was an urban take on the Western sagas that Frankie Laine was singing at the time. It also was a take on the motorcycle movies like The Wild One. Edith Piaf wound up recording it in French.

MM: The turning point appears to be when Elvis Presley recorded your song Hound Dog in 1956. After, you and Leiber wrote a string of hits for him.MS: That’s correct. It's a funny story of how that came about. After a freighter picked up me and my first wife from a lifeboat after the Andrea Doria went down, we were taken to New York. When I arrived, Jerry met me at the pier. The first thing he said was, 'Mike, we have a smash hit—'Hound Dog.' Confused, I asked, 'With Big Mama Thornton?' I just assumed our earlier R&B hit was back for some reason. He said, 'No, some white kid named Elvis Presley'" [laughs].

MM: From then on, starting with Jailhouse Rock, your brand of R&B became rock ‘n’ roll.MS: Yes, but it was accidental. When Jerry and I first started writing, recordings of our songs were played on the extreme ends of the radio dial on stations that had black listening audiences. These stations beamed to those neighborhoods in big cities. After 1956, we found that white kids were tuning into those stations because the music was more exciting than artists like Perry Como.

MM: And Pat Boone?MS: Actually, Pat Boone was an imitation of R&B. He was singing covers of Little Richard, while Georgia Gibbs was covering LaVern Baker. That was in response to white teens who were tuning into those end-of-the-dial stations. Once the major labels found out about the R&B trend, they had white artists cover the songs, artists they felt who wouldn’t offend their advertisers.

MM: Weren't the humorous lyrics of your songs, particularly with the Coasters, also a big part of your music’s crossover appeal?MS: Yes, that’s true. There certainly were elements of Yiddish humor in our songs, and black audiences related to it. Yiddish humor is gallows humor, poking fun at misfortune. Many people don’t realize that Jerry’s first language was Yiddish. He spoke Yiddish until he was 5 years old.

MM: And yet songs like Yakety Yak, One Kiss Led to Another and Wait a Minute had a sophisticated silliness about them—serving up R&B without losing the black delivery and feel.MS: Yiddish humor and black humor aren’t that different. “If it wasn’t for bad luck I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” If you use an Eastern European accent, the song could have been written there in the late 1800s.

JazzWax tracks: There are multiple sets of Leiber and Stoller recordings. The Leiber and Stoller Story is a three-volume set of CDs from the UK that runs about $20 each. Or you can do what I did: Opt for the Spark Records Story, a label Leiber and Stoller started in the early 1950s. There are 30 tracks on a single disc featuring a wide range of songs they wrote and/or produced for various artists.

Then I went for a used copy of The Coasters on Atco: There's a Riot Goin' On, a four disc set that sells for around $45, which is sensational.

About

Marc Myers writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and is author of "Anatomy of a Song" (Grove) and "Why Jazz Happened." Founded in 2007, JazzWax is a two-time winner of the Jazz Journalists Association's best blog award.